Trailer: Vanessa Kirby comes apart in ‘Pieces of a Woman’

Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia LaBeouf) are a Boston couple on the verge of parenthood whose lives change irrevocably when a home birth ends in unimaginable tragedy. Thus begins a yearlong odyssey for Martha, who must navigate her grief while working through fractious relationships with her husband and her domineering mother (Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn), along with the publicly vilified midwife (Molly Parker), whom she must face in court.

Kirby won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, where Netflix scooped up the film soon after. In recent years, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman (2016 and 2018, respectively) both won there as their first step on the way to winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film features a virtuoso 23-minute uncut shot of the birth sequence (shot by Benjamin Loeb) that took four takes over two days to complete. In a recent Q&A with the director and cast, Kirby revealed that it was the fourth take that was used.

Directed by Kornél Mundruczó (White God, winner of the 2014 Prix Un Certain Regard Award), written by Kata Wéber, and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Pieces of a Woman is a deeply personal, searing, and ultimately transcendent story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.

The film is based on Mundruczó and Wéber’s stage play, Pieces of a Woman, performed by the artistic ensemble of TR Warszawa in Poland and based on the the couple’s own personal experience. It is produced by Ashley Levinson, Aaron Ryder and Kevin Turen and co-stars Benny Safdie, Jimmie Fails and Sarah Snook.

Pieces of a Woman will be in select theatres beginning December 30 and on Netflix January 7, 2021. Here is the first trailer.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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